London theatre reviews

Maimuna Memon’s Manic Street Creature did the rounds at the Edinburgh Fringe a few years back, where – I’m ashamed to say – I studiously avoided it because I thought it had a silly name. I still think it has a silly name, but Memon has since shown herself to be a truly formidable talent…

I could definitely cobble together a wanky theory for you about why there’s so much great horror theatre around at the moment. But all you need to know is that there just is, and that following Paranormal Activity and A Ghost in Your Ear – and with the Almeida’s fine looking Under the Shadow on the horizon – there’s reason to get your hopes up that when a nominally scary new play comes along it won’t make you die screaming of cringe…

In a parallel universe in which a harmonious two-state solution was achieved in Israel/Palestine, you might question why a theatre would revive Ryan Craig’s solid (but not classic) Jewish family drama barely a decade after it debuted at the National Theatre. We do not live in that parallel universe…

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the godmother of rock and roll. Her story and her music are extraordinary. So it’s a privilege and a treat to see British soul goddess Beverly Knight play Rosetta in this intimate two-hander, a play with songs that’s all about the music. 

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is as American as apple pie and the electric chair. So on paper it seems like a strange first choice of play for Michael Sheen’s new Welsh National Theatre. But never fear: the whole thing manages to be so exuberantly Welsh that you’ll soon forget the town of Grover’s Corners is supposed to be somewhere in New Hampshire.

Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass is a really weird play. A lot weirder than official summaries tend to divulge. Which is impressive given that official summaries will tell you that it concerns a Jewish Brooklyn housewife who is inexplicably paralysed in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, Germany’s 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom…

Anna Ziegler is one of those American playwrights who has had a million hits back home and remains virtually unproduced over here, (the sole exception being Photograph 51, which was a stonking West End hit about 10 years ago – less because it was an all time classic and more because it had Nicole Kidman in it.)

There’s a nagging irony at the centre of Bird Grove. This play about the young Mary Ann Evans – aka future literary titan George Eliot – features copious scenes of her expressing frustration that only men have a voice in society. But the play itself is very much written by a man, Alexi Kaye Campbell. It more or less styles this out, but there are lines where you wonder how Campell wrote them with a straight face…

Everyone knew there was more to the late Chadwick Boseman than Black Panther, but even so it was somewhat startling when Deep Azure – a play he wrote in 2005 – popped up on the winter programming schedule of Shakespeare’s Globe…

I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever heard proper walk-on applause in this country before. But the Shadowlands audience erupted as soon as star Hugh Bonneville walked out on stage. Either our stiff upper lipped standards are slipping, there were a load of Americans in, or Bonneville fans are simply very, very thirsty people…